The Great SXSW 2010 Preview Dump: Emerging Visions, Part 2

First-time filmmakers often feel like they’re buried beneath the topsoil of indifference. Fortunately, SXSW is there ready with a shovel to help them arise blinking into the bright light shed by Indiewire.com. In the second part of our prEView (see what we did there?), there is among the budding sprouts films about aging, death, vengeance, and poverty. On the brighter side, there’s also a sure candidate for the greatest movie ever made about a parking lot. We’re serious! Click on the titles to watch trailers and more.

Read our SXSW Headliners Preview.
Read the first part of our SXSW Spotlight Premieres preview.
Read the second part of our SXSW Spotlight Premieres preview.
Read our SXSW Narrative Features Competition preview.
Read our SXSW Documentary Features Competition preview.
Read the first part our SXSW Emerging Visions preview.

The Parking Lot Movie

To many, the parking lot is just a parking lot. To the attendants of a Charlottesville, Va., business, it’s a livelihood, a way station between brighter things, or possibly the most rewarding job of their lives. Meghan Eckman and Christopher Hlad hope to do for the humble tarmac what Spellbound did for spelling bees. It’s safe to say that you will never look at a sign reading “$5 for the half hour” the same way again.

Passenger Pigeons

The coalfields of Eastern Kentucky are the terminal backdrop for an intersecting series of narratives. Since that’s about all we know about writer-director Martha Stephens film—aside from the fact that a dead miner looms over all our characters—we’ll remind you that the region has given us such country music acts as Loretta Lynn, Crystal Gayle, the Judds and Tom T. Hall.

Trailerama: Red White & Blue

On Austin’s bar scene, a troubled slut, damaged Iraqi war vet and wannabe rock star collide in unpleasant ways. The second film from British filmmaker Simon Rumley, who directed the well-received The Living and the Dead. Screened at this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival, where Dave Calhoun called it “a chilling film, part character study, part thriller.” Just a warning, the trailer is unsafe to view at work, unless your workplace appreciates breasts and threesomes.

Rotterdam 2010 Preview: Spectrum Premieres

How best to define the Rotterdam Film Festival’s Spectrum sidebar? The site declares that it “brings together highlights of the film year, new work by prominent auteurs and topical, strong and innovative films by accomplished filmmakers.” So really, any old tat. This year’s assortment is particularly lively. As well as a prime cut of Dutch perversity, there are tactile love stories from Thailand, a pair of robust films from the Philippines, the return of Chris Petit, and an Austin-set horror flick. Sharp and sexy, the Spectrum is festival popcorn without tears.

Ang Mundo sa Panahon ng Bato (Stone is the Earth)

Last year the world got the first intimations that Filipino cinema was undergoing a kind of renaissance. Ramon Mes de Guzman moved to filmmaking after becoming a literary success with the short story collection Barriotic Punk. He follows up his festival hit The Road to Kalimugtong with the story of a rural family. A homecoming is followed by a discovery which threatens to undo them all.

Content

Writer/director Chris Petit’s 1980 debut Radio On was the kind of film it’s hard to live down. Shepherded by Wim Wenders, the mix of British road movie and rock ‘n’ roll is still a touchstone for cultists and psychogeographers alike (Petit is profiled in Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory.) His latest promises more of the glorious same. Another journey is mediated by a new century and the zen of the stick shift.